Writer takes a chapter from the climate denier playbook

By the Midland Daily News

Published
9:00 am EDT, Friday, August 2, 2013

Writer takes a chapter from the climate denier playbook

To the editor:

Bill Sandt’s editorial on global warming (MDN 7-21-13) is right out of the global warming denier playbook, possibly distilled directly from the Koch brothers funded Heartland Institute. The pervasive falsehoods used by global warming deniers are in clear evidence.

The “analogy” of a 30 percent increase in atmospheric CO2 and a 30 percent increase in flu cases completely ignores the known thermodynamics of the greenhouse effect (proposed in 1829, proven in 1859 and refined by Arrhenius in 1896). Sandt also throws out the red herring of atmospheric moisture as a global warming gas while ignoring the fundamental atmospheric physics: CO2 accounts for 20 percent of the heat reflectance of the atmosphere. Increasing that reflectance by 30 percent will trap significantly more heat on the earth.

Then Sandt repeats the claim of “expanding Antarctic sea ice” while ignoring NASA data showing that the volume of the Antarctic ice sheet is declining.

This kind of cherry picking of data is typical of the falsehoods on which global warming denial is built. A rational look at the NASA temperature data makes clear what is going on, and it is NOT “the end of global warming” that deniers claim. Nine of the 10 hottest years on record have been in the last decade. Sandt denies the scientific facts outright.

A recent study analyzed the abstracts of nearly 12,000 peer-reviewed scientific papers on climate change published between 1991 and 2011. They also surveyed the authors of those papers, to find out how well the analysis agreed with the authors’ own views on how their papers presented the cause of climate change. They found that more than 97 percent of the scientists who expressed any opinion in their papers about the primary cause of global climate change believed that human activity was the cause.

We can argue what to do about global warming, but to deny it exists while ignoring the vast body of known science is folly.